The Small Engine. The Xbox

Today marked our first “play test” of our small little engine. After spending an hour or so plodding through Microsoft’s rules for developing a project onto the Xbox 360, the project finally showed up on the big screen. Everyone was very excited for about 2 seconds before the heart stopping lag kicked us in the chest. We pulled out a lot of the game world and eventually the project started to run with out lag. Then people started breaking the system, which is the point of a play test. The longer the play sessions went on without a crash, the slower and slower the game out. After a little while, it would be chugging along trying to keep up with people’s insane lust for flying around at warp 9 blowing stuff apart. We found a lot of bugs. But we also had a lot of fun!

The main thing to worry about is definitely the lag, although we have some ideas on how to get rid of some of it. There were some fun physics glitches that caused objects to go flying off into oblivion which single handeldly destroyed the music code aswell as the camera tracking code. And then there was a slew of other minor things like being able to shoot oneself and having a controller that would vibrate until the end of time. Like I said, minor things.

Despite the upsetting amount of lag and the barrage of glitches and bugs, it was a fun day and definitely a step in the right direction.